AI Now Swallows 61% of All Venture Capital - OECD Report Shows a Market Devouring Itself
An OECD report reveals AI firms captured 61% of global venture capital in 2025 at $258.7 billion, doubling their share since 2022, while mega-deals above $1 billion account for half of all investment value.
6 min read
Sixty-one cents of every venture capital dollar spent globally in 2025 went to an AI company.
That single number, buried in a 36-page OECD report published on February 17, tells you more about the state of technology investing than any earnings call or analyst note this quarter. The full picture is starker: $258.7 billion out of $427.1 billion in total global VC flowed to AI firms last year, more than doubling their share from 30% just three years earlier.
TL;DR
- $258.7 billion in VC went to AI firms in 2025 - 61% of all global venture capital
- 75% of that money stayed in the United States ($194 billion); China captured just 5%
- 73% of total AI investment value came from mega-deals exceeding $100 million
- $109.3 billion flowed to AI infrastructure and hosting alone - more than doubling from $47.4 billion in 2024
- Median AI deal remains $5 million, meaning a handful of billion-dollar rounds are distorting the entire market
The Full Dataset
The OECD's numbers cover VC deal data from Preqin across 69 countries from 2012 through 2025. Here is what the acceleration looks like:
| Year | AI VC Investment | Share of Global VC | Key Driver |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | ~$80B | 30% | Post-pandemic correction |
| 2023 | $123.6B | ~40% | ChatGPT-fueled generative AI surge |
| 2024 | ~$170B | ~50% | Infrastructure buildout begins |
| 2025 | $258.7B | 61% | Mega-rounds from OpenAI, Anthropic, Waymo |
The arc is unmistakable. AI is not only a hot sector within venture capital - it has become the majority of venture capital.
What the Numbers Say
The United States Is Running Away With It
The geographic concentration is extreme. American firms captured 75% of all AI VC deal value in 2025, or roughly $194 billion. The EU27 attracted 6% ($15.8 billion), China 5% ($13.9 billion), and the UK 5% ($13.8 billion).
In the US, UK, Israel, and Canada, more than half of all domestic VC investment now flows to AI firms. These aren't markets with a hot AI sector - they are markets where AI has consumed the sector completely.
China's 5% share is especially standout given the country's ambitions. Export controls on advanced chips, US diplomatic pressure on data sovereignty laws, and restricted access to American AI models are all contributing to a widening transatlantic-Pacific investment gap - even as Chinese labs like DeepSeek continue to produce competitive models at a fraction of the cost.
AI's share of global venture capital doubled from 30% to 61% in just three years, according to OECD data covering 69 countries.
Infrastructure Is Eating the Category
Within AI, one sub-sector leads everything else. IT infrastructure and hosting attracted $109.3 billion in 2025, up from $47.4 billion in 2024 - a 130% year-over-year increase. That's more than two-thirds as much as all other AI industry verticals combined ($149.4 billion).
This makes sense when you look at where the biggest checks are being written. OpenAI's $110 billion round was as much about securing compute capacity (Amazon's stateful runtime, Nvidia's 3GW inference commitment) as it was about funding model research. The same pattern holds across Big Tech's $650 billion capex binge and the $1.1 billion week of AI chip startup funding that closed in late February.
Generative AI specifically attracted $35.3 billion, or about 14% of all AI VC. That number sounds modest until you realize it was $2.8 billion in 2022 and $15.3 billion in 2023.
The Mega-Deal Problem
The most troubling signal in the report is the concentration at the top. Mega-deals exceeding $100 million accounted for 73% of total AI investment value in 2025. Deals above $1 billion represented roughly half.
In parallel, the median AI deal size remained $5 million. Early-stage rounds averaged $11.8 million, while later-stage rounds averaged $131 million. Early-stage deals made up 75% of all deal count but only 14% of mega-deals by value.
"Mega deals account for about 73% of total AI investment value in 2025, with deals above $1 billion representing roughly half of total AI investment value, indicating an increasingly concentrated market." - OECD, Venture Capital Investments in AI Through 2025
The translation: thousands of AI startups are raising small seed rounds, but nearly all the actual money is flowing to a dozen companies at the top. The venture capital market for AI is becoming a power law so extreme that the tail is functionally irrelevant to the total.
What the Numbers Don't Say
The OECD report is careful in its methodology, using Preqin deal-level data filtered through standardized industry classifications. But several gaps limit how far you can push these numbers.
First, the report doesn't distinguish between equity VC and strategic investment from corporate balance sheets. Amazon's $50 billion commitment to OpenAI, for instance, is partly a cloud computing deal dressed up as a VC round. Nvidia's $30 billion stake is an inference capacity partnership. Counting these with a $5 million seed round for an AI developer tool distorts what "venture capital" actually means in this context.
AI infrastructure and hosting attracted $109.3 billion in VC funding in 2025 - more than doubling from 2024 as data center buildout accelerated.
Second, the geographic breakdown understates China's actual AI investment because domestic Chinese funding rounds are underrepresented in Preqin's dataset. China's government-backed AI funds, provincial investment vehicles, and closed-ecosystem deals don't always appear in Western databases.
Third, the report doesn't address whether this concentration is healthy. A market where 61% of all VC flows to a single technology category - and where half that money goes to fewer than twenty companies - is a market making a very specific bet. If that bet is wrong, or even just early, the correction will not be confined to AI stocks. It'll ripple through the entire venture ecosystem.
"In 2025, more than half of all VC investment in the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel and Canada flowed to AI firms." - OECD
So What?
The OECD report confirms what anyone following the cost efficiency leaderboard or tracking AI infrastructure spending already suspected: the global technology investment complex has gone all-in on AI, and there's no hedged position left.
That is not inherently a problem. Electricity, railroads, and the internet all attracted outsized capital in their early years, and the world was better for it. But each of those booms also produced violent corrections that wiped out the majority of participants while enriching a small number of winners.
The difference this time is speed. It took the internet a full decade to go from niche investment theme to market-swallowing bubble. AI did it in three years. In 2022, it was 30% of VC. By 2025, it was 61%. If this pace continues, AI won't just dominate venture capital - it'll be venture capital, and everything else will be a rounding error.
For the thousands of startups still raising $5 million seed rounds in AI, the OECD data is a reality check. The money exists, but it is flowing upward - to the companies that already have the compute, the data, and the distribution. Everyone else is competing for a shrinking share of a growing pie, which is another way of saying they're competing for crumbs.
The full OECD report, "Venture Capital Investments in Artificial Intelligence Through 2025," is available here.
Sources:
- OECD - AI firms capture 61% of global venture capital in 2025
- OECD - Venture Capital Investments in AI Through 2025 (Full Report)
- Tekedia - AI Venture Capital Funding Reached $211B in 2025
- TechCrunch - 17 US-based AI companies that have raised $100M or more in 2026
- PitchBook - OpenAI blows past VC fundraising record with $110B round
